My Brother's IPod

My brother got an IPod for christmas. Neat-o. It has a radio tuner and made music right off the cuff. Cool.

I plugged it into a computer and it showed up as a flash drive. Cool.

I stuffed it full of music and... nothing. It doesn't actually play mp3s.

I did some research on the net and found out that you need to sync it to ITunes and shit like that. I run linux, so I spent some time grepping around only to find out that it really isn't an mp3 player.

So I boot into XP and download ITunes. 90 megs. I run the bloated executable. It takes 10 minutes just to pop up a fucking window. Then it takes 3 fucking hours to install! I can install a real fancy operating system in 45 minutes. WTF? At this point I know I'm getting into a world of shit here.

Finally the install of ITunes is done, so I realize the stupid dongle is stuffed full and moved all the mp3s off to make some room, all 1710 of them. That takes a while. Now it's empty. I run ITunes and it takes me straight to a page where I have to enter a valid credit card number to initialize the IPod.

Well, let me tell you. I have been into computers since 1983 and I HAVE NEVER PUT MY CREDIT CARD ON THE INTERNET. There is no choice to pass at this point. I minimize the stupid window and try to just get the 1710 mp3s on it. no go. By this time I've spent about 8 hours fucking around with this idiotic thing. IPods are stupid.

I boot back into linux and drop the issue. About 4 in the morning I wake up with fresh inspiration and compile gtkpod. After some dependency issues I get it going. YEAH! It puts music on the stupid dongle but somehow cannot update the database files. Now I'm 12 hours into the IPod fiasco and it still doesn't play mp3s.

Fuck it. I take it back to my brother and tell him, "This is the first and last IPod I will ever have anything to do with. You wanna fuck with it, go ahead. But I recommend you take it back and buy a real mp3 player."

I saw a nice 16G Philips Muse for only $90.

Fuck Apple and the horse they rode in on.